Listening to My Body Earlier: What I Learned About Pain, Movement, and Recovery
By Carolyn DeSena, Founder of WEforum
For years, I approached pain the way many people do: tolerate it, work around it, and only address it when it becomes impossible to ignore.
My issues were not minor or fleeting. They were persistent and a constant reminder that my body was no longer responding the way it once did. I had always been active; as a teenager, I danced and ran track. As a young adult, I embraced nearly every fitness trend, from Billy Blanks Boot Camp to step classes to Muay Thai kickboxing. Over time, I settled into a more sustainable rhythm of Pilates, yoga, strength training, and court sports, including tennis, paddle, pickleball, and padel.
My joint issues began in my early forties, after three pregnancies and the physical changes that came with them, and continued for more than a decade before I found an approach that truly worked for my body. What started as chronic hip flexor pain, later confirmed by MRI as microtears, gradually expanded into recurring lower back strain with episodes of sciatica due to weightlifting, particularly deadlifts. I also developed an ankle injury from skiing that limited my activity and movement.
The turning point came in an unexpected way. After nearly nine years of daily pain and recurring setbacks, I found myself facing the possibility that I might no longer be able to wear heels comfortably. It may sound trivial, but it was not. It represented something larger, a gradual loss of ease, confidence, and the ability to move through life the way I had always taken for granted.
At each stage, the medical guidance followed a familiar pattern: monitor symptoms, try conservative care, including physical therapy and pain relievers/anti-inflammatories, and if the pain becomes significant enough, consider more invasive options like surgery. In practice, this often meant that the decision was not centered on healing, but on tolerance.
It wasn’t really about the heels. It was the realization that I was slowly adjusting my life around pain, giving up the things I loved while never truly addressing the problem. I was treating symptoms at the site of pain, not the root cause. And at some point, that trade-off, living a more limited version of my life, stopped feeling acceptable.
The Turning Point: Shifting From “Managing Pain” to “Understanding It”
For years, I lived in a cycle of pain, treatment, and temporary relief, always believing the next proposed solution would be the one that fixed it. I had multiple MRIs and tried acupuncture without fully understanding how it worked or how it should be integrated with other therapies. I also pursued Platelet Rich Therapy (PRP), which provided temporary relief, but the pain returned once I resumed rigorous workouts and court sports. I saw at least four different physicians, including an orthopedic surgeon, a spine specialist, a podiatrist, and a sports medicine D.O. and worked with countless traditional physical therapists and chiropractors.
Looking back, most of what I was doing was managing pain, not resolving it. The underlying message was consistent, even if it was never stated directly: adjust your activity, often meaning giving up the very things that kept me active, manage your symptoms and decide how much discomfort you are willing to tolerate.
Over time, that approach began to take a toll. My body became increasingly tight and restricted, and I could feel myself compensating more and more. Even at night, when I should have been recovering, my body would default to positions that felt “safe” but left my muscles and joints tense and misaligned. I would wake up feeling twisted and locked up, as if my body had spent the entire night reinforcing the very patterns that were causing the problem.
And this became my norm, day after day, night after night.
What changed everything was not a single treatment, but a shift in approach. I began working with Dr. Veera Gupta, a chiropractor who focuses on a whole-person philosophy, one that looks beyond the site of pain and examines underlying causes, movement patterns, imbalances, and the role of the nervous system. From my personal experience working with many doctors, Dr. Gupta stood out as an unconventional chiropractor in how she approached treatment, focusing on movement, consistency, and how the body functioned as a whole rather than just where the pain showed up.
She helped change the way I understood both my body and my injuries. It was the first time someone treated the cause instead of the symptom.
Dr. Gupta helped me see that the source of the problem was often somewhere else entirely. Rather than treating isolated symptoms, she identified the imbalances and patterns that were causing my body to compensate, overwork certain areas, and gradually break down over time. She taught me that my brain learned protective patterns that kept my muscles guarded and prioritized safety over optimal movement.
This was the turning point. Instead of asking, “How do I get rid of this pain?” I began asking, “Why is my body moving this way in the first place?”
That shift, from chasing symptoms to addressing root cause, changed everything. It reframed my recovery from something reactive and temporary into something intentional and sustainable.
For the first time, I was not just being treated. I was being understood. That shift led me into three complementary therapies:
- structural alignment
- neuromuscular retraining
- targeted tissue release
The Role of Alignment: Rewriting Compensation Patterns Through the Nervous System
Working with Dr. Gupta multiple times per week, I learned something important: when the body falls out of alignment, it adapts to that misalignment over time. Correcting it required not just realigning my body, but consistently reinforcing that alignment until it became the new normal. I would often see Dr. Gupta two or three times per week, for up to six weeks, until my muscle patterns and movements started to shift.
Alignment refers to how the body is positioned and how joints, muscles, and movement patterns work together to support efficient movement. When the body is properly aligned, weight is distributed evenly, muscles work in coordination, and joints move the way they are designed to. When alignment is off, even slightly, certain areas begin to take on more stress while others do less, creating imbalance. Over time, this uneven distribution places strain on specific muscles and joints, setting the stage for restriction and eventually pain.
The nervous system, which includes the brain and its communication with the body, is constantly working to protect you. It prioritizes safety, not efficiency. If a movement feels unstable or vulnerable, even subtly, the brain will recruit other muscles and compensate to stabilize the area. This redistribution of load, meaning the body shifts work from one muscle to another, is not balanced; it places more demand on certain muscles while others become underutilized, often causing the overworked muscles to become strained, and prone to injury. That response is helpful in the short term, but when it becomes chronic, it leads to overuse and eventually pain.
Over time, those compensations become ingrained patterns, reinforced by the nervous system as the brain’s “default safe position.” So the goal was to retrain my body out of its misalignment and into a new, more stable default position. Alignment alone was not enough, because what my body had learned physically was being reinforced neurologically.
Each adjustment, each movement correction, each exercise was not simply about repositioning the body. It was about sending new signals to my nervous system and teaching it that a different position, a more balanced and efficient one, was safe.
That process required:
- repetition
- consistency
- time
My brain had to relearn what “normal” felt like again. That required dedication and discipline. I had to be intentional about everything; my posture, how I walked, what shoes I wore, and how I performed each exercise. Form was everything. One of the biggest shifts for me was learning how to properly activate my glutes, through consistent, targeted exercises and by consciously thinking about engaging those muscles during movement.
Over time, that awareness turned into a habit. What once required effort and focus became automatic. My muscles began to activate the way they were supposed to, and my movements became more efficient. Eventually, I wasn’t just performing better, I was moving without strain or pain.
Without repetition, the body defaults back to its learned patterns. Muscles tighten, joints shift, and the same compensations reappear, not because the treatment didn’t work, but because the nervous system was not retrained. This is why short-term or sporadic treatment often fails. Yet with commitment and repetition, you are not just correcting structure, you are retraining how the body functions.
Think of it the same way you build strength. You don’t do one set of bicep curls and expect lasting change. You repeat the movement consistently, over time, gradually increasing load until the body adapts. The nervous system works the same way; real recovery doesn’t come from a single intervention, it comes from consistently reinforcing a new pattern until it becomes the body’s default. This made all the difference for me in both managing my symptoms and creating lasting change.
The Third Layer of My Recovery: Releasing Chronic Muscle Tension
I began to understand my body in a way I never had before. Even as my movement patterns improved through targeted exercises and a more consistent focus on alignment, there were still areas that needed additional attention. Some muscles had taken on more than their share of the work and had settled into those patterns over time, and I needed a third component to help them fully release and recover.
This next layer of healing was not a replacement for alignment or movement retraining, and it is not necessary or appropriate for everyone. It’s built on the foundation that had already been established, helping to support and accelerate the progress I was making. This is where I began to explore additional approaches, including both dry needling and acupuncture. For me, it allowed my body to respond more fully to the work I had already put in. Dry needling and acupuncture may look similar on the surface, but how they are applied and how they work are different. Dry needling is more localized and mechanical, targeting specific muscles and areas of tension, while acupuncture works more broadly, influencing how the body regulates pain, stress, and recovery.
Dry needling is typically performed by a physical therapist or trained clinician and involves inserting a very thin needle directly into specific muscles or trigger points. These are areas of tightness or dysfunction that can develop from overuse, compensation, or injury. The goal is to release that tension, improve muscle function, and restore more normal movement. By targeting the muscle directly, dry needling can help reduce tightness, improve range of motion, and allow overworked areas to reset so they are no longer carrying excessive load.
Acupuncture is performed by a licensed practitioner trained in Traditional Chinese Medicine. The needles are placed at specific points on the body, often not directly at the site of pain, but along mapped pathways known as meridians. In traditional practice, these pathways are used to understand how different areas of the body are connected and how symptoms in one area can relate to another. While its traditional framework is based on energy flow, modern research suggests that acupuncture works in part by influencing the nervous system, improving circulation, and reducing inflammation. It can help calm an overactive stress response, reduce pain signaling, and support the body’s ability to regulate itself more effectively.
Dry needling targets specific muscles and areas of tension, while acupuncture uses defined points on the body to influence how the body responds to pain and stress. While they approach it differently, both can help regulate the nervous system and support the body’s ability to recover.
For me, both played a role, but in different ways. Dry needling helped release the specific muscles that had been overworked from years of compensation, especially in my ankle, glutes, and wrist, allowing those areas to finally let go and respond to the alignment and retraining work I had been doing. Acupuncture helped my body settle, reducing overall tension, and supporting my nervous system in a way that made the entire process more effective.
Neither was a standalone solution, and neither replaced the foundational work of alignment and movement retraining. But each approach added another layer, one that helped connect the structural, muscular, and neurological pieces of my recovery.
My Biggest Mistake: Waiting Too Long
This is the part that matters most. I learned to ignore early discomfort, to push through it, and to wait until something became more severe. I entered a clinical system that offered medications, prescriptions for therapies that didn’t work, imaging, and eventually surgery, without ever having a real conversation about the root cause of my pain.
Most of my conversations with doctors centered around pain tolerance. It wasn’t that they didn’t know I had injured my ankle skiing or strained my back during a deadlift that led to sciatica; but no one was asking why my ankle wasn’t stable enough to withstand the injury, or why my back was compensating in the first place. No one was connecting it to tight calves, poor stability, a weak core, tight psoas muscles, or the fact that I wasn’t properly activating my glutes.
What this experience made clear to me was simple. I had to stop waiting until something hurt enough to take action and start paying attention earlier. Small aches and subtle changes in movement were not things to push through; they were signals that something needed attention before it became a bigger problem.
While I can’t say everyone’s experience will be the same, I can share mine in the hope that it encourages others to become more proactive and engaged in their own care. If we listen to our bodies earlier, the approach could look very different. My protocol now, at the first sign of an issue:
- Reduce load and inflammation (rest, ice, anti-inflammatories when appropriate)
- Identify the cause (what changed, what was overloaded, what compensated)
- Correct movement patterns (how I was moving and where I was compensating)
- Use targeted therapies early (alignment, physical therapy, and when appropriate, dry needling or acupuncture)
- Restore proper activation patterns (core, glutes, and balanced muscle engagement)
- Track patterns over time (what consistently triggers issues and how my body responds)
The Takeaway
I learned that consistency matters more than intensity. Real change did not come from one treatment or one session; it came from showing up repeatedly, reinforcing better patterns, and staying committed to the process even when progress felt slow. It took me almost three years to understand my body, my patterns, and how my movement, habits, and compensation were all connected.
I had to become more aware, not just of where the pain was, but of what might have caused it; how I moved, how I trained, what I wore, and how my body responded over time. I began reviewing my activity after every ache, trying to understand what may have led to the strain. That awareness became the foundation for preventing issues before they escalated.
What I always try to remember is that my body is constantly communicating with me. Tightness, discomfort, and small limitations are not inconveniences; they are early signals. And if I respond early, with the right approach, I don’t just manage pain, but have an opportunity to prevent it from becoming something much harder to fix.
Disclaimer
This article reflects a personal experience and is intended for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and should not be relied upon as a substitute for professional medical guidance.
Individual needs, conditions, and responses to treatment can vary significantly. The approaches described here may not be appropriate for everyone. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional before beginning any new treatment, therapy, or exercise program, especially if you are experiencing pain, have an existing injury, or have underlying health conditions.
Nothing in this article is intended to replace clinical evaluation or individualized care. If you are experiencing persistent or worsening symptoms, seek appropriate medical attention.
Carolyn C. DeSena is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of WEforum Group, a female-led nonprofit dedicated to advancing health and wellness education. Guided by her belief that education and access are powerful tools for lasting change, she created WEforum to help communities achieve and sustain optimal physical and mental well-being. Under her leadership, WEforum has launched initiatives including the Women’s Health and Wellness Conference, Wise Up Teen Advocacy Group, WEforum Fit Crawl, Beyond the Game: Ready for Life Athletic Symposium, and Community Conversations, bringing accessible and practical health education to diverse audiences.
DeSena also serves on the boards of the Monmouth Medical Center Foundation (RWJBarnabas Health) and The 52nd Street Project in New York City, and supports organizations dedicated to education, the arts, and community wellness.
Photo credit: cosmin4000
